


Cuddles & Confessions

by Damned_Writers



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series)
Genre: AIDS mention, Cuddling, Established Relationship, Fluff, Internalised Homophobia, Introspection, Johnny Lawrence has ADHD, M/M, Mild references to abuse, Post-Canon, Recovering Alcoholic Johnny Lawrence, Very Loving Relationship, discussions of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29397846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damned_Writers/pseuds/Damned_Writers
Summary: In which Daniel and Johnny cuddle, discuss buried memories, and trace their lives back to the beginning.
Relationships: Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence, Mentioned Past Daniel LaRusso/Terry Silver, Mentioned Past One-Sided Johnny Lawrence/Bobby Brown
Comments: 13
Kudos: 78





	Cuddles & Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> This is softer than the tags make it out to be, but covering my bases. That being said, I'm writing the both of them as men who repressed their queerness for most of their lives and that leaves a mark. 
> 
> There's two uses of the word "fag," both times from Johnny Lawrence, both times in relation to the past.

1.

Daniel was a fucking cuddler. That didn’t surprise Johnny and deep, _deep_ down he kinda liked it even, although it took – like everything in their lives – a long time to figure out how they fit together in the bedroom (except for the sex – ninety-five percent of the time the sex was awesome, even though Johnny still had his hang-ups that sometimes caused friction. But everything apart from the sex – how they slept, how long they slept for, what mattress to sleep on, and yeah, cuddling, those things felt impossible to work out until suddenly they’d _been_ worked out and only with minimal hurt feelings – Daniel’s feelings that was, Johnny didn’t get emotional like that, he _didn’t_ ).

Maybe deep down he even fucking loved (another difficult thing to figure out – love. Even after so much time it seemed like something not meant for him and he barely ever even thought about it, let alone spoke it out loud) Daniel’s scrawny arms wrapping around him.

How did he keep that shape? Yeah, he’d shot out of the ground sometime after kicking Johnny in the face and before prom (Johnny was still a little taller, but sometimes he kinda missed the kid who mouthed off like he was the size of Muhammed Ali), but he was still mostly a fucking scarecrow with a tummy, while Johnny filled out bit-by-bit year-by-year no matter how much he trained. Daniel was all edges, just like his personality when you scraped a little bit at his surface-level-amiability, as Johnny loved (there was that word again) to do. Technically there should be nothing enjoyable about getting poked by Daniel’s enamoured elbows and knees, and yet it made something in Johnny’s brain spark – serotonin, the kids these days called it. Johnny secretly thought about it like taking drugs, except much better because getting addicted to it didn’t come with a sell-by date.

Unless it did, of course. Johnny wasn’t stupid. Yeah, he wasn’t the most knowledgeable or self-aware all the time, but he knew that he’d fucked up every relationship in the past, usually almost as soon as they’d begun. It wasn’t just the alcohol (he’d started AA meetings on Daniel’s insistence), or his – apparently – _abrasive_ personality (he hadn’t been arrested for a fight in a record length of time – doing “meditation” with Daniel was helping more than he’d ever admit in him controlling his temper, better than the pills the quacks were tryna get him on for ADHD, which as far as Johnny was concerned just translated to _Not Trying Hard Enough -_ he and Daniel still fought about that, which was why he'd agreed to the meditation in the first place as a peace offering), or even the fact that the opening notes of their relationship had been Johnny beating the hell out of him at the beach. They’d gotten over that. Kinda.

It was just… who he was. You could polish him up, give him three square meals a day, and sneakily throw out his old brown suit and replace it with a couple of fancy newer ones, but he was… yeah. He was Johnny Lawrence, Ace Degenerate. Not proud about it, but he’d lived like that for over half a lifetime and he wasn’t sure that any other version of him even existed underneath all that. Take it or (as made more sense) leave it, baby.

But he wanted Daniel and Daniel knew him better than anyone alive in the world and despite that he wanted him too, if all the sex and cuddling and cooking and kissing and fond looks and willingness to do Iron Eagle marathons (Daniel liked them more than he let on, Johnny _knew_ it), and thousands of other things was anything to go by. Which meant Johnny could _try._ He’d failed enough times not to expect it to last, but he’d also tried enough times he considered himself enough of a fucking lunatic that he’d keep on trying.

It was actually because Daniel already knew him so well that he trod carefully, even when Daniel pushed him in directions that made him uncomfortable – carefully-er. More carefully. He still fucked up a lot of the time, acted like the bull to Daniel’s china-shop, but definitely more careful than before, even if that was a distressingly low bar. The AA meetings had taken a hell of a lot of arguing, cajoling, ignoring, and embarrassing slip ups after swearing he had a handle on it, but ultimately it had been a wake-up call that if he wanted this – and he discovered then that he really, really wanted this – he needed to shape up.

So he cuddled Daniel. Because Daniel was a cuddler and because deep, deep, deep, deep down… he kinda liked it too.

2.

Daniel knew that the laundry list of _Things That Made Johnny Lawrence Uncomfortable In Relationships, Especially A Relationship With A Guy, Especially A Relationship With Daniel,_ was long. Probably too long to ever fully tick off, but Daniel hadn’t gotten to where he was by knowing when to leave well enough alone and Johnny was – in a more loving than antagonistic way these days – a favourite target of his. Not because he wanted him to be uncomfortable, but because every little crowbarred lock against his vulnerability that he broke brought with it gold-dust.

 _Johnny Lawrence was gold-dust._ It was the last thought in his head before he said out loud: “How many guys’d you kiss before me?”

Johnny froze in his arms. Yeah, he should’ve figured that wasn’t something he’d be prepared for, but if answering a question like that was harder for him than letting Daniel routinely stick his dick inside him (crass, and Daniel heard it in Johnny’s voice, but he had literally been performing the act less than five minutes of cuddling ago, in comparison this had seemed like it was low on the scale of _Things That Made You A Queer_ in Johnny’s mind) then maybe it was something they oughta talk about.

Maybe not.

But Daniel had already asked.

“Why do you care?” asked Johnny, predictably bad at nonchalance that didn’t come off as confrontational instead.

“I don’t care-”

“- so why do you wanna know?”

“Because… guess I’m just curious.”

“Same thing isn’t it? Just lips.”

“Sure, I just-” he sat up on his elbow to properly get a read on Johnny’s face: “Wait, am I the only guy you ever kissed?”

“No, actually... just doesn’t matter, does it. So. Stop asking.”

He was frowning in a way that seemed two seconds from this becoming a fight, but at least he hadn’t turned away from him. Somewhere within Daniel’s mind he heard Miyagi telling him to leave it alone, know when the limit had been hit. Show mercy. Besides, he wanted to keep cuddling and Johnny was letting him, which was always a win, so he settled in again and heard a soft exhale of relief.

He really, really loved cuddling Johnny. All the large hard planes of his body offset by the softness that came with age, like a metaphor for Johnny himself. He’d made himself big and strong, because softness was weakness. But scratch just a little (or crowbar, sometimes brute-force really was the way to go) there was the gold-dust – big and strong and soft and surprisingly good with kids, and trying his best, and filled with so many emotions that had fermented with all the time he’d spent suppressing them that they routinely bubbled over the top (the bad and the good), and he was probably always gonna be better at physical displays of affection than words.

That was okay.

Words weren’t everything. Cuddling was pretty damn good too.

  
  


3.

“One, by the way,” said Daniel after awhile. Johnny was halfway to drifting off, wondering dimly when he’d felt so safe with another body since his mum had died.

“One what?” he murmured.

“I kissed one guy that wasn’t you. Spent my college money tryna get Miyagi’s Little Trees off the ground, got into Cobra Kai… and. Yeah. Around that time.”

They’d spoken of this before. Daniel had wanted to be transparent, to fully, finally explain why Johnny reopening Cobra Kai had hit him so hard and his terror that Johnny was becoming everything that Kreese had wanted… Johnny hadn’t ever even suspected. He doubted anyone had.

It was so stupid, how all those years the two of them had carried all that bullshit that could’ve been – not healed, but… borne together… two confused kids with so much in common… Daniel didn’t often hold back now, so he was surprised he’d never mentioned this before.

“So, what, just some guy?” That image (Daniel at eighteen, maybe in a bar with a faceless guy who possibly looked a bit like himself at the same age) woke him right back up again, taking Daniel’s silence as confirmation. “Shit… wouldn’ta thought you’d have that in you. So wait, did you…?” (his mind immediately filtered through a dozen images. He knew Daniel hadn’t been fucked before him, he’d told him pretty early on and they’d popped that cherry together, but there was so much else- _no,_ _focus_ _dumbass,_ Daniel wasn’t done talking) -

“No, not… not really…” the continued hesitance was suspicious. Daniel only ever sounded like that when he was very upset – it was a permanently disquieting tone of voice any time he mentioned Silv- the penny dropped.

Johnny moved back to get a better look at him in the darkness. “I’m gonna kill him,” he said simply, once his expression confirmed his guess. Point him in the right fucking direction.

It seemed to jolt Daniel out of the headspace he’d been stuck in and he actually smiled wanly for a moment, shaking his head. “It wasn’t even bad. It was… well, it was _bad,_ but it wasn’t punch wood until your hands bleed…” Johnny frowned, wanting to tell him that it was very bad, even if it hadn’t physically hurt, but he was experiencing a rare instance of knowing when to shut up and listen. Daniel continued, something stilted in his voice, like he was struggling for words: “It was just… if Miyagi hadn’t set my head straight it would’ve been so much worse, I’d’ve let it go so much further. I wanted it. And I guess I just didn’t trust after that. And knowing that he knew. That he could use that against me, even when he never did, just taunts and hints, you know. So I never… after that, didn’t get close to a guy. I knew about the AIDS crisis too, which kinda solidified for me that it wasn’t really worth it anyway. For the longest time they’d have you thinking looking funny at a guy would make you catch it, and what if it was someone like Silver again… and by the time I’d wised up I was already dating Amanda. Didn’t matter if I’d missed out, or… or whatever else could’a happened," he finished, sounding like he didn't believe himself.

Yeah, AIDS was a thing that Johnny’d thought about when he was young as well. Vaguely. In the same way he’d thought about all the other ways a fag might die and then pushed those thoughts away, because that didn’t matter, it had nothing to do with him, it definitely, absolutely had nothing to do with him.

“Not like you to give up just because some asshole wins the first round,” he said and was rewarded with an offended glare. He loved (he was very loving tonight) Daniel’s glare. He wanted to kiss it away, be the cause of his distress and the cure. That sounded like a lyric to a song, somewhere.

He wanted to kiss Silver right out of the haunted look in his eye. So he did. Nothing fancy, just a touch to the lips, smooth those subtle wrinkles off his forehead, succeed in chasing away the memories for now.

“I’m not always reckless,” Daniel huffed after, unconvincingly.

“Yeah, only… ninety-eight percent of the time.”

Daniel shoved him affectionately, and all the implications of the confession – everything that Daniel had never been able to do, the life he maybe could’ve lived, the loves he could’ve had, the reasons that he still struggled to talk about this – were forgotten for a moment as they ribbed each other on _Who’s-Historically-Been-The-Most-Impulsive_ and came up pretty even.

Surprisingly it was Johnny who circled back around, waiting until a companionable silence had fallen over them again. “So.. one, huh?”

“…Yeah, just the one.”

Just the one. He knew Daniel was looking at him, expecting more from that thought, but Johnny’s brain wasn’t quite letting it settle into a proper… anything. It just seemed poetic somehow, despite the presence of the man in question who’d stolen a first moment that should’ve been great – maybe awkward and stilted, but man, Johnny would’ve rocked Daniel’s fucking socks off if it had been him. It never could’ve been, not with Johnny’s own fucked uppedness at the time, but if it _had_.

He knew Daniel had shared this with him just because he’d wanted to, not to guilt Johnny into answering the original question. Daniel was like that – you thought all that honesty was a front, but underneath it all was just more honesty. And reckless, impulsive behaviour. And something Johnny wanted to never lose. The emotion had him leaning in to kiss him again, softly, gratified that Daniel looked at him afterwards with an expression like he couldn’t quite believe this was real. If Daniel looked at him like that then maybe he wasn’t screwing this up after all.

Not long after they fell asleep, still holding onto each other.

  
  


4.

As Daniel knew was common with Johnny, he’d let whatever thought he was having trail away, only for it to burst out again, seemingly out of the blue, an indeterminable length of time later.

“Same,” he said while washing up a few days after the original conversation, as if replying to something Daniel had said a few seconds ago.

“Huh?” he said, halfway to putting a plate away. They’d done rock-paper-scissors to see who dried and Daniel had lost, halfway through rolling up his shirt-sleeves before Johnny had said he’d do the dirty shit this time around.

“I only kissed one guy besides you,” Johnny clarified, not turning to look at him as he spoke.

“Yeah?” said Daniel, careful not to sound as interested as he was. He knew he was failing, but Johnny indulged him regardless, even if his voice was flat as if none of it mattered, and his eyes continued to bore holes into the glass he was rinsing.

“Yeah, I was… eight? Nine? I don’t know, before my mum married Sid anyway. He was my best friend. That age you don’t know better, so I thought about kissing him and I did.”

“Then what?”

“Then he punched me in the mouth and called me a fag, you know, kid’s stuff. Repeating shit they don’t get. We moved to Encino, never saw him again. Figured that was my second chance, learned you don’t kiss a guy just cos some stupid voice in your head is telling you to. And I was hanging around _Bobby,_ I mean, you saw him when we were all kids, he was… still is, to be honest… anyway I never fucking made a move. He never suspected a thing. Easy.”

“Easy?” It sure didn’t sound easy, even without all the detail he knew Johnny probably wasn’t giving on purpose. And maybe now wasn’t the time either to tell Johnny that Bobby – always the perceptive one – probably had known, probably even would’ve supported him if he’d thought Johnny could’ve handled that sort of kindness.

If Johnny had kissed Bobby as the first, things might’ve gone down differently. Maybe he would’ve never brought his shame to Kreese for him to abuse. Maybe by the time Daniel moved into town Johnny could’ve been the sort of person who could’ve kissed him and meant it.

Maybe…

He wondered why it had taken him so long to see it, despite Johnny’s macho front. Johnny wore feelings a lot more openly than he would ever admit to and he’d only confused Daniel because his camouflage of choice had been belligerence. But even then… Daniel had _liked_ antagonising him for reasons he’d put down to wanting to impress Ali, who’d never cared much one way or another beyond wanting him to get a comeuppance. (Daniel had never asked her about the Johnny she’d dated at the beginning, before Kreese had burrowed himself too deeply into his head. Whatever that Johnny had been, while still present in the Johnny he was now, he was still mostly a dream that had been killed by people whose own hurt was translated into abusing kids as a main pasttime). Daniel hadn’t liked getting beat up on, but he’d liked – he still liked – Johnny responding to his sharpness. The way it showed on his features when he’d gotten to him. He wore that expression now and it was sexy as all hell.

“Sure, most of the time.”

“Bet I made it hard,” smirked Daniel, prodding further to see how Johnny responded.

To his surprise, Johnny looked at him with eyes turning soft like he almost never let them be. “… You did, actually. You’ve got no idea how much I hated your guts for that.”

“I’ve got some. The bruises made it pretty obvious.”

“Yeah, well… you were always in my fucking face, LaRusso.”

“And you were always a pain in the ass, _Lawrence,_ ” shot Daniel without any heat.

“Heh, hell yeah I-”

“I wouldn’t finish that joke if I were you.”

Johnny flicked some of the soapy water at him and the conversation was once again forgotten as they devolved into single-brain-celled cavemen and flooded the kitchen, before they eventually gave up on the remainder of the washing-up and took a shower to get rid of the grime (Daniel’s suggestion, Johnny resisted for five seconds until Daniel began to undress and suddenly couldn’t join him fast enough).

They didn’t return to it again, but Daniel continued to think about it all late that night, while they were quiet and wrapped around each other in a way that Daniel supposed mirrored their whole lives, for better or for worse. As he often did, he tried to trace the puzzle, understand exactly when Johnny had gone from the asshole ex-boyfriend he’d met on the beach to this. He kinda had the prologue now: A boy kisses his friend, ends up too scared to do it again, a man sees his fear and uses it to make the boy his, until another boy comes into town and makes things a lot harder…

There were so many things, so many details, so much that belonged to Johnny’s side of the story that he’d probably never know, but he had one more small piece in the shape of an eight-or-nine year old kissing his best friend and feeling the consequences of it resonate throughout both of their lives, inevitably drawing them together, no matter how much they fought.

If Johnny had more to say, he’d do so on his own time. Daniel didn’t need all the details, not like he’d used to need them in order to understand himself, responding so counter to Miyagi’s teachings when Johnny had appeared on the scene again, burying and burying and burying so that even those who loved him the most ended up not getting him, not until he’d been able to share it and Johnny had returned the favour, like dams bursting. Only time he’d ever seen Johnny cry. _Really_ cry.

If that had been the whole story – two lost kids and the men who’d used them – it might’ve been a tragedy. But they were here now. At a point of not needing to speak to understand each other after a lifetime of misunderstandings… this was something he hadn’t expected and had come to love more than almost anything else. He knew Johnny better than anyone. He knew that they were two sides to the same coin, only fully realised when both of those sides were witnessed. He knew that Johnny was trying so hard for him that he sometimes frayed at the edges and needed someone to remind him that he was enough. And he knew, without him ever needing to say it, that Johnny Lawerence fucking loved cuddling.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Kudos/Comments always welcome^^


End file.
